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  Veedrac
  Wow this paper is bad. I was expecting little and received genuine crackpottery.It's hard to critique this paper directly because its claims are so incoherent and decorated with so much obnoxious verbiage[1] that people aren't going to believe me when I point out what the claims actually are.Regardless, this is their paper:First, they conflate the substrate with the presentation layer. Then, they point out that Turing equivalence means you can run an LLM on anything, with a pointless aside where they nerd out about making a logic gate in AoE II. This lets them conclude that you can use anything as the presentation layer.Then they claim that it's natural to ascribe human-like attributes to outputs from some presentation layers, like abstract letter symbols on a computer screen, but not to most other things, like patterns of goats on AoE II, or LEGO. Yes, this seems to imply if your partner writes something heartwarming to you using LEGO, you're meant to laugh at them and point out how LEGO isn't intelligent so this isn't evidence of anything.Then they do a thing where they say that assuming substrate independence is true (or false) prevents proving whether substrate independence is true or false, and from this, but just by vibes AFAICT, make it sound like everything one could learn about attributes of a system from its outputs is circular.Then they write a bunch more incoherent text and mercifully then it ends.[1] 'from an epistemic perspective, we argue that a generalised conclusion such as that necessarily requires a well-designed experiment' — the whole thing is like this.
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  kybernetikos
  I'm not sure who this kind of thing is aimed at. I think the majority of people who are happy to anthropomorphise LLMs from a philosophical point of view (rather than those who just do it for convenience, the same way you might a cat or dog or stupid thermostat that never works right), are already completely happy with the notion that a computer game might have elements that are human like. They've already accepted that key aspects of being a human are substrate independent, so why would the idea of a computer game as substrate be disconcerting to them? There's no bullet left to bite here.
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  glenstein
  I see a lot of this on Substack these days. LLM enhanced essays in deep language about functional equivalence between mental states as they're known in humans and in human brains, and counterparts that exist in information processing LLMs do. And so the argument on Substact runs down the list of brain events, the list of seemingly analogous processing events, and declares equivalence.Something about it seems to abuse the power of analogies to draw connections, treating view from 10,000 feet comparisons like they're proof of identity. So I do think a paper like this is perfect for the moment and just in time (if not a little late) because it responds to arguments of a form that are currently rampant all over Substack.
• pmontra
  It seems that the point of the paper is that if LLMs have human like attributes they do have them even if instead of running on a CPU/GPU they run on any of the systems that have been demonstrated to be Turing complete, including the ones in the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness#Unintentio...The interaction with those LLMs would be excruciatingly slow, probably spanning over multiple human lifetimes, but yes, why not?
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  captainbland
  This kind of work continues to make me think that ultimately we're not going to do anything better than just declaring "being a human" is the thing we end up needing to care about, and that searching for abstract properties which explains us better than the sum of our parts is going to be an ultimately fruitless endeavour.
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  azan_
  Either human-like attributes can be described using physics or they are magic. If they can be described using physics then they can be simulated. If they can be simulated then they can be simulated in any Turing complete system, include AoE II.
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  currymj
  this paper makes a lot of modest, carefully hedged, and reasonable claims.in its tone however it's written as if it's a brutal takedown of... somebody's perspective. It's hard to tell whose or what perspective exactly. Maybe I'm just misreading the writing style.(Personally, I think the general case here is one of the better objections to computationalism about consciousness. You can make it even more absurd.There exists some isomorphism between the velocities of the molecules in a glass of water, and the states of a Turing machine simulating a human mind. So is the glass of water conscious? Actually there are many such isomorphisms to many possible conscious minds, so is every glass of water simultaneously having every possible conscious experience?)
• ddosmax556
  The title of the paper itself is odd. "LLM" is an abstract computation that's performed on some substrate, could be GPUs, could be a piece of paper, could je Minecraft, could be AoE, or could be all of them together.That's not a property of LLMs thought, that's a trivial property related to turing completeness. I don't get what LLMs have to do with this - if LLMs have anthropomorphic properties, so does AoEII, duh, it's called emergence
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  objclxt
  > note that any entity in a sufficiently-powerful substrate, such as LEGO or the Greater Boston Area, could also present such attributes.See also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain
• barefootford
  It’s worth a reminder on this thread that this 20 year-old game just got ported to macOS last week and is available on steam. For those of you interested in playing again but don’t have a gaming PC sitting around.
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  warumdarum
  Llms are like the grand canyon.. It could totally immagine user reesponses too, the avg user is not even in the canyon unless you stop responding hit a break on character switch. The river of tokens flows with you in it or without you in it. The system of possible routes may be vast, but it can not carve new things from the statistic bedrock, it just wildly flickers between adjacent river arms.
• ma2kx
  All I see is some confusing talk about bit-goats and a player who attacks with his scout while the other trades and builds new buildings. Why does it matter that there is an infinite gold supply if the logic is scripted with bit-goats in the editor anyway? I mean if they mechanic is turing complete thats completely unrelated to how you can script with the editor.
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  i5heu
  So, if I understand this correctly, this paper proves that LLMs can run on crude VMs?
• doener
  Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48429681
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  klipt
  AoE may be Turing complete but see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit
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  joenot443
  Is it this easy to get a paper published on Arxiv?
• jorl17
  You had me at the NAND gate in AoE II's editor.
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  juliusceasar
  9
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  andai
  > we begin by implementing and training a neural network in Age of Empires II (AoE II) Although it might seem like a fun exercise, wholly unrelated to the topic of anthropomorphism in LLM research, we note that this immediately implies that (1) any sufficiently powerful substrate could implement an entity equivalent to an LLMWhy does it imply that? That doesn't sound right to me. Unless we define "sufficiently powerful" as by definition producing that outcome, which seems unhelpful.e.g. there have been experiments training transformers on things other than language, and it's not clear that this produces LLM-like qualities (nor does it seem likely to me).---Edit: I have misunderstood. The point was that LLMs can be run on any hardware (or in this case, emulator) that can do the actual computations. So the author picked AoE because it's an obviously silly example that goes against the tendency to anthropomorphize.So basically it's the "substance/structure" question. (GPT-5 running on human neurons. Conscious or nah? Human neurons simulated on NVidia. Conscious or nah?)But by the same argument, if you simulate a human brain in AoE, then what?( Or for that matter, the universe containing all human brains: https://xkcd.com/505/ )If we find out the universe is being run on a computer made out of legos, does that suddenly make all of us not sentient for some reason?
• zuzululu
  good article I do think that its natural for humans to anthromorphize especially something that can do a convincing job butt the leap to AOE2 is a bit stretching things. If you hear your dog say 'wololo' is he AOE2 ?
• PearlRiver
  LLM is just math. Which is why I do not like AI- it is nothing like in Deus Ex or those Japanese anime were computers are cute little girls who want to blow up the planet. Reality is as always sorely disappointing.Now of course as an atheist I do not believe in soul and humans are just following evolutionary programming but we will never see chatGPT do standup comedy.
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  Animats
  Because Age of Empires II can do a NAND gate? Oh, please.I thought this was going to be about NPCs in video games. NPCs, by intent, have human-like attributes. It's not hard to do. I've done a bit of that, pre-LLM. It doesn't even require anything near intelligence. Some NPCs are better than that. Unreal has demoed some that, if asked about it, can be made to understand that they are NPCs in a game world, and will talk reasonably about it.[1][1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sCWf2VGdfc
• scotty79
  Jumping spider with just a handful of neurons has many human-like attributes. Size matters.
• anon
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• fxtentacle
  “ and prove that Age of Empires II is functionally- and Turing-complete.”
• IshKebab
  This appears to be philosophical pseudo-nonsense. Not worth reading, sorry.
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  cyanydeez
  isnt this essentially the tiktok tick effect: people who arw continually exposed to a certain cultural aphorism will start to align their behavior to the LLM and generate the psychosis of the LLM. humans are just to susceptible Age of empires cannot do this.hence, what matters is the reversibility of the semblence, not the semblence.LLMs do not do this readily, even if you can instruct them to, say, talk like a vampire, they wont just follow along. humNs winn.
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  321982
  This entire morality or consciousness "research" is just advertising or publication pressure. If you don't prompt an LLM, it does nothing. Automated prompting does not count.The damn thing is a huge approximation function from input to output. It learns morality from correct inputs. Remember Microslops's Tay chatbot? Remember MechaHitler?The whole industry is a Scientology cult by people who have read too much cheap SciFi. Unfortunately finance bros, who obviously believe none of this nonsense and laugh at the nerds, think they can milk it.
• knightops_dev
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• redsocksfan45
  [dead]
• havyurnaskjdfas
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• anon
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• Havoc
  This is a very strange take. Almost like a conclusion you'd reach if you were told about a chatbot and AoEII but never interacted with them yourself.It's a take that is just disconnected from reality.Ask a LLM whether bombing hiroshima was justified and you'll likely get a nuanced response. Ask AoEII the same...and well it doesn't even have an interface to ask that let alone answer....the entire premise is just gibberish
• anon
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• anon
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